Would you dedicate your life to conserving the planet and the creatures that inhabit this planet? Prof Nalini Puniamoorthy, Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences, NUS, and Founder of The Reproductive Evolution Lab does so with her revolutionary work.
The 38-year-old evolutionary biologist who specialises in sexual selection and speciation, founded a “sex lab” at the National University of Singapore (NUS) when she returned to Singapore in 2017. “I’m especially interested in the sexual selection and reproduction of insects, so I wanted to set up a lab at NUS called the ‘sex lab’, but you can’t really get away with that,” she chuckles. And so she named it the Reproductive Evolution Lab.
She currently leads the research on the reproductive trait evolution of insects that are ecologically relevant to Singapore, such as black soldier flies, dung beetles and mosquitoes. Prior to her return, Prof Nalini had spent 10 years pursuing her graduate research in Europe and her postdoctoral research in North America, where she worked with people from different disciplines involving sexual selection, molecular evolution, speciation and ecological adaptation.